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Keeping Their Own Counsel

By Tobin Harshaw July 10, 2007 3:01 pmJuly 10, 2007 3:01 pm

“John McCain’s top two advisers – John Weaver and Terry Nelson – quit the campaign today as Mr. McCain struggled to get his once surging campaign back on course,” reports Adam Nagourney at The Times’s Caucus blog. “Their departure came after Mr. McCain announced last week that his campaign had just $2 million in the bank, and was forced to lay off most of its staff.”

And then things got worse: “One Republican directly connected to today’s events said that Mark Salter, McCain’s long-time chief of staff and co-author of his five books, had also left the campaign payroll,” reports Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic Online.

Ana Marie Cox at Swampland is uncharacteristically wistful. “The departure of Salter and Weaver marks the end of one of the most charismatic and legendary political braintrusts this town has seen — especially considering that they never actually won the presidency,” she writes. “Journalists regarded Salter as McCain’s alter-ego and he was the source of some of the Senator’s most memorable lines — both in speeches and in the form of the some half-dozen books that the two wrote together. (Their next one debuts next month. That oughta be a fun book tour…) Salter leaving the campaign — and the Senator’s side — is the most visible sign that the McCain [campaign] is not just desperate but hopelessly astray.”

“Money doesn’t mean you’re going to win, but over the long haul it’s the life-blood of a Presidential campaign,” notes one contributor, Gary. “And Ron Paul has more cash on hand than the former front-runner for the GOP nomination. Yikes! If you can’t pay your people, they see the hand-writing on the wall.”

Rich Lowry at The Corner, however, doesn’t think this is all bad news for the McCain campaign. “It probably means Rick Davis is taking over,” notes Lowry. “He had run the campaign last time, but had no day-to-day responsibility this time and had been pushed upstairs. Then, John Weaver brought Terry Nelson in to run the campaign. As one strategist puts it, ‘They ran it into the ground.’ So this was a fight between Weaver and Davis that Davis won.”

Of course, McCain isn’t the only senator, or presidential candidate, having a tough day. The titillating tattle in Washington today is all about Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, whose phone number turned up in the newly released records of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called D.C. Madam. What does this have to do with the race for the nomination? Leave that to the all-knowing Ambinder:

“Recall that Vitter was among the first Republicans to endorse the presidential candidacy of Rudy Giuliani and has come to serve as one of Giuliani’s chief liaisons to social conservatives. He is also Giuliani’s chief whip in the Senate and serves as the Southern regional chairman of his campaign.”

So, the Republican campaign has become a swamp of sex scandals, nasty divorces and personal betrayals. Anyone think the Democrats are feeling a few pangs of nostalgia?

Alas, the senior Senator from Arizona (my resident state) embarrased himself by going to the Senate floor yesterday to state that he observed “movement in the right direction” in the Iraq civil war. What is this man smoking? How many Iraqis were blown up last weekend? Is this the “movement in the right direction” that formerly “Straight Talk John McCain” observed in his Iraqi visit? Please leave the 10 dwarfs race for the Republican nomination so that Fred “Dwarf #11 or #10 if McCain does the honorable thing” can try to be the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Just what the United States needs is another Grade Z movie actor who thinks he should be President!